8 Days of Holiday Cards! Day 4: Santa's Cheers

Welcome Back! Today, I have a fun new technique to EASILY ground your stamped and die-cut images, without having to make an elaborate scene!

When I get new sets, I often search through Pinterest, Lawn Fawn's blog, Flickr groups, Lawnscaping's blog, etc., to find fun ideas for using each set. I'll also stamp and die-cut multiple images, so I have them ready to go when making cards later. I followed this same process with the Hats Off to You and Gnome Sweet Gnome sets, ultimately planning on pairing a santa hat on the gnome to make him Jolly Old St. Nicholas, and, of course, giving him a giant latte to prepare him for his Christmas Eve shenanigans! :) I had a large number of these Santas ready to go, without an idea of what the scene should look like, and then I found an awesome card from another Lawn Fawn fanatic, using a simple technique that I knew would work perfectly with this card!

For the background of this card, I simply used a strip of post-it note tape across the card, and blended Distress Ink with an ink blender up from the post-it note tape line. This makes the line darker closer to the tape line, and lighter as you go up so it eventually fades into the card, giving the impression of a wall behind the die-cut image and a floor below. SUPER SIMPLE, y'all - and makes for a stunning pop of color! I stamped the sentiment with Memento Tuxedo Black Ink, being careful to place it above where the latte would end up so that it has the steam effect. I finished the card by mounting the die cut images with foam squares.

I liked the end result a lot and repeated it for a few cards, but wanted to change it up a bit and use the Cheers sentiment from the Let's Bokeh set. I find that I use the individual words in this set all the time for all different types of projects, and I love the scripted font for the Cheers sentiment specifically. Because it doesn't have the same steam-like effect of the other sentiment, I decided to use it below the images on these additional cards. I was definitely pleased with the results!

Because I loved this ink blended background technique so much, I decided to try it again with another card, and reverse the direction of the blending so it went down instead of up. I used some fun pups from the Lawn Fawn Happy Howlidays limited edition Stamptember set made for Simon Says Stamp, which happen to look like our dog, Penny. :) All of the images in the card below were stamped on watercolor paper and colored with either watercolor pencils or watercolor distress ink. The Santa Paws part of the sentiment was stamped first with red ink, but I didn't like it as much and decided to stamp over it with Memento Tuxedo Black Ink afterward, which unintentionally created the halo effect, so I just went with it. :) All of the cards shown today were on A2 Paper Source Superfine White folded cards.

Paper Lantern Congratulations Card

A good friend recently found out incredible news, and I needed to put together a congrats card for her. I hadn't used the Lawn Fawn retired Lunar Lights set in awhile, and loved how the shine bright sentiment from my recently purchased Let's Bokeh set fit perfectly with this set, so I decided to combine the two.

I'd previously made an in-laid die-cut congrats card for a different friend using mint letters in a white panel, so I was able to use the reverse pieces for this project. The letters were stamped with a light grey ink using Quinn's ABCs, and then die-cut and in-laid into the mint panel. The papers used are Paper Source mint and superfine white.

I stamped the small lamps on their strings with versamark ink to create the background, and heat set in order to get a darker watermark effect.

For the large lamps, I first used watercolor to create the soft colors I wanted, then stamped the lamps on the watercolored papers with Memento Tuxedo Black Ink, and fussy cut them out. I stamped the lamps again directly on the mint paper where I wanted to position the lamps, using a masking technique, and adding in the hanging elements from the bottoms of two of the lamps. I then used 3M foam tape to pop up the cut out lamps on the mint panel. I finished the front by coloring in the hanging pieces of the middle lamp with a clear shimmer pen.

For the inside, I used a masking technique to stamp two of the lamps and their hanging elements, and then stamped the shine bright sentiment to finish it out.